A Fort of Nine Towers (19 page)

I heard her ask somebody where I was.

“I’m here, I’m okay.” I waved at her from where I was standing. I had thought about her many times when we were in the tunnel, wanting to tell her the things we were enduring. Sometimes I wondered whether I would be like Ahmad, who did not live to see his son in this world, and I would never see her again. Now she was running toward me, shouting.

“Get away from those coffins!” She hugged me and kissed me more than a hundred times. My face was almost wet from her lips and tears. Or maybe they were my tears.

My mother drew my father and me inside and led us to a corner of our room and sat us there. My mother was fluttering around us like a butterfly. She kept drying her eyes and her runny nose with her sleeves. She gave my father three pillows instead of one. She did not know whether to laugh or cry. I had never seen her like that before. She was not herself anymore.

Relatives whom I usually saw only at wedding parties followed us in and crowded along the walls. My youngest aunt whispered into my father’s ear, “Ask your wife to sit next to you. She has been crying for two weeks. She’ll go crazy if you don’t help her control her feelings. She is in a state of shock. Do something.”

Numbly, he asked my mother to sit next to him, though usually men and women do not sit together when there are visitors present. She sat next to my father for a few seconds, then jumped up again. “I have to prepare lunch for you two.”

“No, no, we’re not hungry; I want you to sit next to me,” my father exclaimed.

“I think Qais is hungry. You both look very thin,” my mother said.

“No, no, he is all right. We had a huge breakfast this morning and we’re still fully stuffed. Just come and sit next to me,” my father said.

I smiled at her and pretended I was not starving.

My father wanted me to make room for my mother, but she said, “No, no!” and squeezed herself between both of us. She started patting my hair and staring at my father without a word, as if she had not seen him for years.

Kids were peeping through the windows and giggling. No one knew what to say. Maybe no one wanted to say anything, because it was the sweetest moment any of us had had in the time since the fighting had started.

My mother broke the silence. She jumped up from between us and almost frightened me. She kneeled in front of my father with her back toward the others. She cried very loudly, “Is this really you or am I dreaming? Please tell me it is true!”

My father leaned forward on his knees to embrace her. “Yes, this is me. I am here for you. I will never go anywhere. I’m fine, I am fine. It is okay now, it is okay.”

I could hear the heavy breaths of my mother and my father as they clung to each other. My father was rubbing her back. My mother was shaking silently. Tears came from her eyes, though they were closed; my father’s, too.

The men and women in the room were now laughing in low voices, but at the same time wiping their own eyes. Finally, my mother stood and asked me and my father to come with her to another room nearby that was empty. She seemed suddenly to be aware that everyone was watching the three of us, and she wanted to be alone with us. She turned to the others and said, “We will be back soon.” She ordered my uncles to prepare lunch for everyone. Now she seemed to be herself again.

In the empty room she kissed me and my father over and over again. She never minded the dirt on our faces, or maybe she could not
see it, or maybe she did not know what to do except to kiss us. She never asked me or my father what had happened to us during the past two weeks. Maybe she did not want to know. She was only happy to have us back.

A few minutes later, we rejoined the others. Everyone was laughing and enjoying one another’s company; the funeral had turned into something like a wedding party. We spent the whole day singing and dancing, with my uncles playing flutes and drums, even though there were two coffins in the courtyard ready to be buried. Instead, we used them as benches for the guests. I was worried, though, that if the thin wood on the lid broke, my kites and reel would get smashed. Each time I looked at Jerk, I wanted to smash his face. “I’m not going to let him get away with what he did,” I told myself. “He made me look very stupid.”

My sisters told me about the new novels they had read and the new movies they had watched. My little brother looked at me and smiled. My cousins told me about their past two weeks’ adventures and who won the bets on kite fighting with the neighbors. They showed me their money to make me feel jealous. They had no idea what had happened to me, and until now I have never told them, or anybody.

The North

B
y now we had been living in the Qala-e-Noborja for well over a year while the war in Kabul writhed around us. All this time, the front lines shifted like angry snakes. Today the Panjshiris would control one sector; tomorrow it was in the hands of the Hazaras; and the next day it would be held by Sayyaf, and a couple of days later, Gulbuddin, or Dostum. Rockets streaked over our heads, not caring where they landed.

Almost every evening, there was more talk among my uncles and my father about leaving Kabul. The smuggler who was going to take us to Russia had heard that a funeral had been planned for my father. We had never given him any money. So he took somebody else. He did not know that we had come back from the dead. We never saw him again.

One morning at breakfast while my father was eating some yogurt, he very calmly told my sisters and me, “I have decided that we shall go to Mazar and stay with your mother’s sister for a while.” Mazar is up north, on the other side of the Hindu Kush mountains. We had gone there many times before the fighting had started. Once we had flown there in an airplane.

I asked whether Wakeel was coming with us. My father said “No.” Then I asked if Grandfather was coming. He said “No.” I was stunned that we were going away and leaving them. I went to the other room and told Wakeel. He thought I was joking. He came with me to our room and saw my mother packing. He asked my father whether he was coming with us.

“Not this time, Wakeel,” he said kindly. “We are not going on a picnic. We are heading to Mazar to spend some time with Qais’s aunt. My hope is that while we are there, I can find a way to take everybody out of Afghanistan. Then I will come back and get you guys.”

“Shall I come, too?” Wakeel asked, as if he had not heard what my father had just told him. My father always bought him whatever he bought for us and took him wherever he took us, and he could not understand why he was being left behind.

“No, there is just not enough space in the car for all of us,” my father said.

“There is plenty of space in the car,” Wakeel said insistently. “There were fifteen of us and the baby when we came from our house to this place. Don’t you remember?” He looked at me and my sister for confirmation. We were afraid to say anything, because my father was in one of those moods where we could not tell whether he was angry. We nodded, but tried to avoid looking at our father’s eyes.

“That was a short distance,” my father said. “Now we are going to the other side of Afghanistan, easily ten hours of driving.” His voice was getting a little bit hard.

“That is okay,” I said, “we can squeeze in the backseat.”

“No more discussion,” my father said with a loud voice that startled us all. “I said ‘No,’ and it stays that way. No more discussions.”

After Wakeel’s father had disappeared, all my uncles had done their best to help him. But he was closest to my father, who had always included him in everything my immediate family had done, as if Wakeel were his own son. I did not understand how he could even think of leaving Wakeel behind.

This was the first time I was going to be really separated from Wakeel. With all the uncertainty that had contorted our lives since
the day his father had disappeared, the one thing that each of us could count on was the other.

One day about a year before, I had searched for him everywhere, but I could not find him. I climbed the ladder to the roof of the Qala-e-Noborja to look in the hiding place that we always used when we played hide-and-seek. He was sitting there, alone, staring into space. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he acted startled and looked at me. I asked him what he was thinking about. He said it was nothing. He sounded sad. I asked him whether something was wrong. He said “No.”

Wakeel was always cheerful and happy. Is he hiding something from me? I asked myself.

I sat down next to him and said nothing. I started staring at where he had been looking. For a few minutes we remained silent. He glanced at me several times, and I kept staring into space. He waved his hand in front of my eyes, and I pretended that I did not notice. He tapped on my shoulder and asked me what I was looking at. I told him I was imitating him. He smiled.

He said, “You are lucky that you’re Qais, and not Wakeel.”

“Why?” I asked. “I wish I were Wakeel, who is very good at flying kites, and having lots of friends, and being very popular at school, and climbing trees, and being the oldest child of his mother and the older brother to his sisters so he can order them around to polish his shoes and bring his tea and water. Who in the world doesn’t want to be Wakeel?

“Look at me,” I went on. “My friends are the little kids. I am no good at flying kites. I’m not as popular as you are in school, and not all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles love me like they do you. I can’t order my older sister to do anything for me. She always bosses me around. Who in the world wants to be Qais?”

“I do,” Wakeel said.

“Why?” I asked, very surprised.

“Because you have a dad, and I don’t,” he said, his voice shaking. “Every day when you wake up, your father kisses you on the cheek. Every day you exercise with your father, he lets you beat him, he plays with you, he teases you, he sits on your bedside when you are sick, he
wakes up in the middle of the night to check on you when you’re having nightmares or you mumble in your dreams, he warns you when you do something bad, he points out your mistakes, he tries to fix them with you, he wants you to climb higher on the ladder of your life, he is with you all the time. You can let yourself fall back, and you know there is your father, who will hold you.” The words were coming out in a rush. “Who will hold me when I fall back? When I tumble and break into bits and pieces, there is no one to collect me. I have to collect myself and get back with my life. I want my dad. I want him to hold me when I fall back.” He burst into tears and rushed out of the hiding place, tripping as he climbed down.

I did not know what to do. Should I run after him and give him a hug? No, I was younger than he; I cannot do that, I told myself. His dad should give him that kind of a hug.

An hour later, Wakeel had his cheerful glow on his face again and was making jokes that made everyone laugh. But suddenly I understood that for all these years his jokes had been chasing a shadow from his soul.

“Only a dad can fill the space of a dad, not your uncles nor your grandfather, only your own dad,” he told me. Then he recited a couplet from his favorite poem by Hafiz: “To make one heart happy can be greater than making a thousand sacred journeys.”

Once, when we were sitting in the lowest part of the garden of the Qala-e-Noborja near the pool, Wakeel told me that he was worried what would happen if his father came home; he would not know where to look for us. He would go to Grandfather’s house and not find us there.

“I think he is still alive,” Wakeel said. “If he had died, he would have sent a sign.”

“What kind of sign?”

“I don’t know. I will know it when I see it.”

An hour later, we were ready to go. We did not have much to take. Our few clothes quickly went into our two suitcases and then into the trunk of the car. My mother gathered up whatever food we had in the
house and put it in large sacks. Grandfather and my uncles and aunts and cousins all stood around the car to say goodbye to us as we drove away from Noborja.

Wakeel ran after our car. The car was faster than he was and left a track of dust in the air. I popped my head out of the front seat and waved at him, trying to smile. My sisters were looking back at everyone from the rear window and were waving as well. When we disappeared around the corner near the British Embassy, Wakeel stood in the middle of the street, despair all over his face, shoulders drooped, breathing hard and lost in the dust.